This article was written by Sarah Crown, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 13th August 2010 06.00 UTC

For those with an ear to the ground, the rumblings about Room, Emma Donoghue’s latest book, have been audible for months. First came the bidding war, eventually won in the UK by Picador; then the rumours, rare these days, of an astronomical advance (the figure of €1m has been mentioned; Donoghue allows only that it was “mortifyingly large”). And at the end of last month, a fortnight before it was due to appear in bookshops, Room was longlisted for the Man Booker prize. At that point, the rumblings turned into a roar.

Until now, Donoghue’s reputation had been founded on her knack for spotting historical rough diamonds and buffing them into glowing narratives. Slammerkin, her unlikely bestseller in 2000, was spun out of a murder on the Welsh borders in 1763, while in 2006 The Sealed Letter took a notorious Victorian divorce as its grist. In the run-up to publication, however, word was that Donoghue’s seventh novel would be based on the modern-day case of Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter, Elisabeth, in a basement for 24 years, raped her repeatedly and fathered her seven children – three of whom he imprisoned with her. Unsurprisingly, accusations of cynicism and sensationalism abounded. When I meet Donoghue, halfway through a publication tour that has mushroomed thanks to her longlisting, she recalls the period as “quite painful. A lot of people made out I was writing this sinister, money-making book to exploit the grief of victims. I was thinking, it’s not like that, but no one will know until they read it.”

She is keen, too, to contextualise the link between her novel and the Fritzl case. “To say Room is based on the Fritzl case is too strong,” she says firmly. “I’d say it was triggered by it. The newspaper reports of Felix Fritzl [Elisabeth's son], aged five, emerging into a world he didn’t know about, put the idea into my head. That notion of the wide-eyed child emerging into the world like a Martian coming to Earth: it seized me.”

The whump Donoghue experienced on hearing Felix Fritzl’s story may have had something to do with the fact that her own son was four at the time. Donoghue has two children – Finn, now six, and Una, three – with her female partner Chris Roulston, a professor of women’s studies at the University of Western Ontario. The couple live in Canada, though Donoghue hails from Ireland; she is the daughter of renowned academic and TS Eliot scholar Denis Donoghue. Born in Dublin in 1969, the youngest of eight, Donoghue was the only member of her brood to follow her father into a literary career. She left Ireland in her 20s to complete a doctorate at Cambridge, published her first novel, Stir Fry, in 1994 at the age of 25, and has not looked back. Much has been made of Donoghue’s status as an outsider on the Booker longlist, someone who is finally getting her moment in the sun; Donoghue doesn’t view it that way at all. “I’ve been writing full-time since I was 23,” she says. “I’ve always thought of myself as a huge success!”

Her own crowded childhood could hardly be further removed from the experience of Room’s five-year-old narrator, Jack, but it is through him that Donoghue explodes any doubts her detractors might have had about the wisdom or value of her project. Living with his Ma in an 11ft x 11ft shed, knowing nothing of the outside world beyond the fantasies of the television screen, Jack is a warped version of Maurice Sendak’s Max, from Where The Wild Things Are: a boy for whom “the walls became the world all around”. His material needs are met by “Old Nick”, who comes at night bringing food and “Sundaytreat” (painkillers, new clothes), and making the bedsprings creak.

But while for us (and Ma) such an existence is horrifying, for Jack it simply is. Lacking any other frame of reference, his Room is neither small nor, in any psychological sense, a prison. Its objects, which he names as friends – Plant, Skylight, Rug – swell in our minds, too, assuming far greater proportions than the physical space would appear to allow (although in terms of feet and inches Donoghue was scrupulously naturalistic, using a home design website to ensure everything fitted). Through Jack, Donoghue pours light and air into a prison cell, and transforms his story from a prurient horror show into a redemptive tale of resilience and salvation. As I read the book, it wasn’t the Fritzl case that echoed through my head, but a couplet from John Donne’s The Good Morrow: “For love all love of other sights controls,/ And makes one little room an everywhere.”

It was, furthermore, by filtering the story through Jack’s artless five-year-old obsessions (what’s for dinner? where does the poo go when you flush the toilet?) that Donoghue sidestepped any potential queasiness. “My conscience wasn’t troubled,” she says. “I knew that by sticking to the child’s-eye perspective there’d be nothing voyeuristic about it. Ma has managed to keep Jack almost oblivious to the sexual side of things – the creaking bed makes him edgy, but lots of other things, green beans, for instance, make him edgier still. I knew the chills would be justified. The book has some really serious questions to ask.”

Of all the book’s questions, those that centre on the parent-child bond are at its core. By placing Jack and Ma in a near-literal crucible, Donoghue is able to stress and test a relationship that can be stressful and testing under the easiest of circumstances. “Lots of people have called the book a celebration of mother-child love, but it’s really more of an interrogation,” says Donoghue. “I never had Ma and Jack say ‘I love you’; I thought, I’m failing if they need to say it. I wanted to conjure up that love but not have big soppy pools of it lying around. Love is what’s saving them both, yes, but there are problems to it.”

Part of the book’s pleasure derives from Donoghue’s decision not to airbrush those problems: Jack’s fizzing frustration when he senses Ma’s answers to his questions aren’t up to scratch; Ma’s flash of furious despair when Jack demands she read Dylan the Digger again. “Really, everything in Room is just a defamiliarisation of ordinary parenthood,” Donoghue agrees. “The idea was to focus on the primal drama of parenthood: the way from moment to moment you swing from comforter to tormentor, just as kids simultaneously light up our lives and drive us nuts. I was trying to capture that strange, bipolar quality of parenthood. For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it’s not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you’ll ever have.”

Jack, of course, has two biological parents – but he barely glimpses the man who fathered him. Nameless and storyless, Donoghue’s Old Nick has a fairytale, bogeyman quality. Though he comes and goes under cover of dark, his presence nevertheless blankets every object in Room with a patina of threat, which Jack senses, even if he can’t understand it. “I deliberately restricted his access to the book,” Donoghue says. “I didn’t give him a childhood because I didn’t want to let him off the hook. Once he’s arrested he disappears, because I refuse to be that interested in him. As a society we’ve given disproportionate attention to the psychopaths – the average thriller is about a psychopath who wants to rape and chop up a woman. I wanted to focus on how a woman could create normal love in a box.”

Donoghue’s success in doing just that positions her book as a response of sorts to another novel based on a real-life crime. In Lionel Shriver’s Orange-prizewinning We Need to Talk About Kevin, sparked by the Columbine massacre, a mother and her son create hell in the heart of a middle-class idyll; in Room, Ma and Jack conjure humdrum beauty out of a kind of hell. “I found Shriver’s book very inspiring,” Donoghue says. “Every parent has those moments where they look at their child and think, ‘There’s a demon in those eyes and no one can see it but me!’. I could see how she extrapolated from that. With Room, I was trying to extrapolate from those moments where, as a parent, you think, ‘I’ve been stuck in this room playing with this doll for years!’. Shriver is also a great reminder that you don’t have to be a parent to write these stories [Shriver is childless]. I hate it when people say, ‘Oh, you could only have written this as a mother.’ The best book I know about being a battered wife is Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.”

In Donoghue’s case, the applause has been loud and lengthy. A week after publication, Room’s commercial success (it is already the second-best seller on the Booker longlist, with only Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap ahead of it) has been matched by uniformly laudatory reviews. Donoghue is visibly thrilled, too, by her place on the longlist.

“When I was a child, trying to get to sleep, I’d lie there thinking, ‘What’ll I wear to the Booker?’ I feel like I’ve been brushed by the feather of fame. And I see now that it’s not just about who wins, it’s about drawing attention to the business of fiction. It makes people care about books, starts an international debate about what people are looking for in the novel.

“Room,” she says, with the sort of starry grin you’d expect from someone who had just been told they’d won the thing, “has already been denounced on the Booker talkboards. You want to have that sort of passionate, angry discussion about literature. You want it to matter.”

• Room is published by Picador, price £12.99.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

The book remainder business is booming and bargain bookshops are popping up all over Dublin city centre. You can’t have missed them and that’s probably the point.

Any word preceded by BARGAIN printed in large, high-visibility letters is sure to attract customers in large numbers, even just for a look, especially now, at a time when bargain doesn’t carry the same negative connotations it once did; customers want to pay less and are getting used to doing so.

While the idea of remainders (to say nothing of pulping) is an uncomfortable one for publishers, oftentimes it’s a good way of cutting losses on a book that might not be working.

Bargains Galore
If you wanted cheap books before the arrival of this new breed of bargain bookstore, in Dublin, you went to the now comparatively old-school discount bookshops (which stock new books alongside remainders and second-hand books) like Books Upstairs and Chapters, who place emphasis on quality and range, ambience and loyal customers yet still manage to be pretty cheap.

These new shops are essentially louder Hodges Figgis bargain basements with more windows and brightly-coloured signage. The shop floors are dotted with waist-high stacks of hardbacks and coffee table books priced less than the cost of the round-trip bus fare or petrol it took to get you there.

The fiction sections consist mainly of more prominent authors’ backlists with few or no midlist authors, and vast quantities of large-format hardbacks.

Competition
The proximity both in terms of physical location and product, of these new bargain book shops to full priced shops would lead one to think that they must be competing with each other.

However, one bargain shop manager said, ‘We wouldn’t see it as competition – we don’t have any regular customers really, it’s just impulse buys.’

Speaking to managers and staff at both bargain and full-priced bookshops around Dublin, the overwhelming consensus at the shop-level is that they don’t see each other as competition.

Bargain stores acknowledge that they aren’t the same kind of shop – they don’t carry the same stock and ostensibly don’t attract the same customers who came into town intending to buy books.

Traditional retailers are more dismissive of the threat, mainly because they haven’t been hurt by the new arrivals. A bookseller on the floor at a large, city-centre chain said, ‘They just have a lot of the stuff we couldn’t sell – backlists and coffee table books that don’t really sell anyway . . . Most of the discount and quantity buying is done at our corporate headquarters, but we’re getting about the same books in we always did.’

Impact
Asked whether customers were buying differently, browsing differently, more annoyed about pricing, an employee at another large shop summed it up with a simple, ‘No.’

One possibility is that the impact of the new bargain stores is not yet visible because it is still only very small. Or maybe it hasn’t yet had time to manifest itself in hard numbers or consumer behaviour; which wouldn’t be unusual for new entrants to a market.

For customers with a specific book in mind or fussier customers, they are less useful: the best case scenario is there will be one or two titles by an author you like, by an author you’ve been meaning to read (which may or may not be the one you’ve heard of), or one you read a review of some months previously but forgot to buy. In any event, you go in with a different set of expectations.

The past couple of decades have seen the arrival of at least three perceived threats to traditional bookselling and publishers alike; the internet, supermarket booksellers and ebooks. All of these have been selling books with strikingly low price tags.

But inasmuch as every bookselling venue has to play to its strengths and as relatively cheap books are becoming such a commonplace sight even in traditional bookstores, making venue even less and less important, it ultimately remains to be seen what this new player’s effect will be.

Today is an exciting day for Irish Publishing News. Our first regular contributor has posted his first article.
Robert Maguire is a musician and freelance journalist. A self-professed jack of all trades, he has studied film and psychology; worked in bookselling, and been involved in music for several years.
As a writer, he has contributed to several online publications, including Egoeccentric and Connected Magazine.
As a musician he performs with the Irish based alternative-rock band Clockwork Noise.
Robert’s articles for Irish Publishing News will be primarily longer feature pieces, much like his first contribution; Literature In The Face Of Recession: A Profile Of The Dalkey Book Festival

I’m delighted to have Robert on board and I look forward to adding more contributors over the coming months.

Eoin Purcell
Editor, Irish Publishing News

It has been a busy month for Irish Publishing News. So busy we didn’t get a round up post out so here, as a monthly digest, it is! To celebrate the iPad launch in the UK and the forthcoming launch here in July we’ve added a rather nice image from Flickr User Jesus Belzunce.

Lots more to come in June!

Hughes & Hughes Dun Laoghaire

However, industry observers pointed to the company’s rapid growth in recent years as playing a significant role in its downfall. The chain expanded its presence in shopping malls such as the Pavilions Shopping Centre in Swords and Dundrum Town Centre at the height of the boom, locking itself into high rents.

The latest accounts for Hughes & Hughes show that the bookseller posted sales of more than €37m to the 53 weeks ended March 2008, up more than €6m year-on-year.

The 2008 year also saw the company return to profit and the directors expressed confidence of “future progress” when they signed off their report in August 2008, just before the financial collapse.

The company closed the year with bank loans of more than €5.8m and shareholders’ loans of €750,000. The debt is likely to have gone up since then, given the business’ expansion.

Company filings also show that Ulster Bank has a number of charges registered against Hughes & Hughes.

Just before Christmas we wanted to buy 60 copies to the wonderful “Tribes” by US marketing Guru Seth Godin to send to customers as a thank you present. I phoned around and the price in Hughes & Hughes was €16 per copy. We ended up getting the books on Amazon.co.uk for just €7.50 per copy. The price was the same on Amazon whether we were was getting one copy or 70. Do you see now why Hughes & Hughes is gone out of business?

Poetry Ireland is to Livecast Seamus Heaney’s poetry reading at the National Gallery today.

The link to the livecast is here.

By Declan Burke of Crime Always Pays

The publishing industry is in a state of chassis, if I can misquote Sean O’Casey, the Amazon-Macmillan slugfest being the latest example of how the writer and the reader, inarguably the most important elements of the publishing food-chain, are being ill-served by the intermediaries. Writers want to write, readers want to read … it should be easy, right? Nope. Readers are still getting their fill, given that (according to Henry Porter, below) “during the worst recession for 80 years, book sales went down last year by just 1.2% in value and only 0.5% in volume.” On the other hand, writers are having advances slashed and contracts torn up, this when they can get published at all.

A good friend of mine, and a damn fine writer, who shall remain nameless lest the publisher that keeps him on the breadline gets a whiff of sulphur, has advocated on more than one occasion recently that like-minded writers should get together and set up a co-op, akin to the United Artists studio of early Hollywood lore. In theory, it can be done: e-publishing and print-on-demand are just two elements of contemporary technology that allow writers to circumvent the publishing circus and go straight to readers. Okay, it won’t be happening today or tomorrow, but there’s a momentum building that suggests it’s becoming a distinct possibility in the near future. Hell, a media-savvy band of writers that rides the environmentally-friendly ticket (e-pub and POD = more Rain Forest) could discover that Green = the green.

First problem: self-publishing is vanity publishing, right? Leaving aside the fact, as @stevemosby pointed out on Twitter last week, that all publishing is vanity publishing, the idea that it’s bad to have the courage of your convictions appears to be limited to the publishing industry. Quoth Simon Crump on the Guardian Book Blog:

But surely that’s a business model, a standard template for ambition? The conviction that what you’ve got is good enough to release into the wild and stands a reasonable chance of selling is at the heart of launching any new product.

Pausing only to declare an interest, in that I co-published THE BIG O with Hag’s Head, and self-pubbed CRIME ALWAYS PAYS to Kindle, and that I’m thinking of self-publishing in the near future, we’ll move on swiftly to the aforementioned Henry Porter, also on the Guardian Book Blog:

What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.

Heady stuff, folks, in theory at least. But I’m genuinely curious: as a reader (and all writers are readers first and foremost, or the good ones are anyway), what’s your take on the self-published book? Does it come freighted with overweening ambition and reeking of talentless desperation? Or is there the possibility that a self-published novel might simply be one that doesn’t fit the industry’s current requirements? Is there, for that matter, the possibility that there’s a small but perfectly formed audience out there hungry for novels and authors that don’t fit the industry’s current requirements?

I’m not a fool, and these days I certainly can’t afford to be parted from my money by investing in self-published novels and author co-ops and similar fripperies. And yet there’s a part of me that keeps nagging on about how now is the time to get in on the ground floor with self-pub POD, before the big companies wise up and move in with faux-indie offshoots and sponsored writing collectives and the like. Or is it already too late?

A comment in response to my column in The Bookseller today caught my eye:

There is another strand to the issues facing Irish publishing, though, in that aside from fiction, Ireland, and I am troubled by saying this but believe it is true, behaves provinicially. There is a lack of books published by Irish publishers that stand alone on the international market, books that are not specifically related to Ireland. Obviously the Irish market is important, but in the wider scheme, it is small. Bookshops do support Irish titles, but they are also filled with books by UK and US publishers that are not specifically related to the UK or US. It would be good to see an Irish published non-fiction book do as well as some of the fiction produced. There seems no reason why there should not be more ambition to this end, and a drive to look beyond Ireland’s own shores.

And got me thinking. I wanted to find out what people thought, so here, is a poll with a simple question and answer! Let us know what you think!

photo credit: andrewrennie
This column first appeared in The Bookseller on 20.01.10

Book sales in Ireland in 2009 fell by 5%, according to Nielsen BookScan’s measure of the Irish Consumer Market. Not a bad result in this environment, and still comfortably above 2007 levels.

However, these resolute sales mask some worrying trends that look likely to continue in 2010. The first of these is that Irish publishers are under-performing the overall market. There are some exceptions to this trend, but Gill & Macmillan was down almost 10%, O’Brien down 20%, Mercier down more than 12% and the likes of Maverick and Merlin down even more. By contrast, while Transworld Ireland suffered a decline in sales of just under 5%, in line with the market, both Penguin Ireland with a gain of more than 12% and Hachette Ireland with an increase of just under 4% outperformed the market.

The industry experienced a number of redundancies in 2009 and if Irish companies continue to under-perform in this fashion, then we should expect that to continue. It might even be the case that one of the smaller market players may be forced out of business or in the case of very small publishers, to simply stop publishing.

The second trend is that wider economic weakness will impact on booksellers in 2010. Irish consumers will curtail their spending even further in 2010. They are faced with the double fear of higher taxes and less stable employment.

Fortunately, the perception that books in Ireland are expensive relative to prices in other jurisdictions is at least dissipating, but even that is at the cost to retailers of the favourable sterling/euro rate. The fall in the value of the sterling has wiped out the attractive price differential for books, leaving the margins of booksellers pressured.

Given the legacy lease costs that some retailers have to cope with and the pressure on consumer spending, bookshops will be feeling the pressure in 2010. That said, a flurry of new stores opened in 2009 and seem to be trading rather well. A more long-term trend is the shift towards digital retailing and e-books. Amazon is now offering its Super Saver shipping deal to Irish customers, enabling anyone spending more than £25 to ship for free, while the Book Depository offers free delivery to Ireland (as it does elsewhere).

Although Kindle doesn’t seem to have made a significant impact in 2009, despite its availability since October, there is every reason to believe that Ireland will see the arrival of larger numbers of the Kindle and its e-reader rivals in 2010, suggesting that digital preparedness (not something our native publishers are noted for) will be important.

While most publishers and retailers will be happy to see the back of 2009, 2010 offers nothing more than a breathing space and there is the strong possibility that if wider economic trends do not improve, it may not even offer that.

Mr Darcy, Vampyre

Having published our first children’s book just before Christmas, I had more reason than normal to look closely at what is being promoted for children through bookshops and equally what is best selling. I have to confess as I wandered through the bookshops that I guiltily pondered how easier it might be to get publicity and the attention of older children if our book only contained a vampire.

Now don’t get me wrong our book was based on the wonderful folk tales collected by Douglas Hyde over a hundred years ago and the pure joy I got from those stories was the driving reason we decided to publish. The book was also a storybook and our intention was never to aim for a teenage market but when you see the sales that Stephanie Meyer is driving through the charts and the publicity vampire books generate you think, well, what if? What if one of those original stories had contained a vampire wouldn’t it make a nice addition to your sales pitch.

Again we got great coverage and support for our title, helped by the very well received illustrations that Paul Bolger contributed to the book, but it got me thinking on a larger scale. What if I was trying to make a book appeal to teenagers how easier it would be if the book contained a minimum quota of one vampire. The more I thought about it the more logical it seemed. A classics list recently placed a sticker on its books saying ‘does not contain zombies’ but how effective would a sticker be that said ‘contains a minimum of one vampire.’

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is surely a struggle for the average teen living on a diet of love lorn teenage vampires. All a clever publisher need do is change Mrs. Havisham into a vampire. She, with curtains always drawn, is a prime candidate. With a little stretch we could have her die with a wooden stake through her heart, hardly acceptable in the original but a very valid end for a vampire. Sacrilege I hear you cry but the change required is so small, would we not be happy with teenagers reading 90% of the original text, to allow us get a sticker on the front saying ‘contains a minimum of one vampire.’

There are no end of books that could benefit from such a sticker, creating countless appeal for teenagers. Instead of shooting a rabid dog Atticus, in To Kill a Mockingbird, could hammer a stake through the heart of a marauding vampire and instead say ‘I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man driving a stake through a marauding vampire’s heart. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.’ A whole new generation would open up to that key message, again only the slightest change is required.

Another great benefit would be that key works of literature would find themselves drifting to the front of bookshops. When the inevitable ‘vamp lit’ sections are put into action, beside their forerunner the ‘misery lit’ section, literature will find itself in a key position with their now readily recognisable vampire stickers.

Please feel free to post your suggestions of how to turn a serious work of fiction into a vampire book with only the slightest of change. I will send a free copy of Ancient Folk Tales of Ireland to the most original. The judge’s decision will be final and we accept no responsibility if any publisher is crazy enough to follow any of the suggestions above or any of those posted by you.

Colm Ennis is Publisher at Hawk Hill Publishing Limited and a former head of buying at Hughes & Hughes one of of Ireland’s largest booksellers.